Pair Programming[1] is a established practice in part of the software development world. In a culture of lone-rangers, the idea of two people working productively together to get *one* thing done still meets resistance.

The tale is about me trying to peer with my Boss to work on a network routing problem.

At all times in the process I was aware of the chasm in authority, technical savvy, and comfort with the intimacy that kept us from pairing efectively. To bridge that gap I tried with the Humble Inquiry tips from Ed Schein’s Presencing Global Classroom second session.

We circled around the problem, a lecture on the current system state, we both writing some docs, …, and then, after a silence, we casually began to work on the real domain ….

Two practices became fundamental to introduce pairing. First Humble Inquiry, switching roles and questioning level appropriately. Second, Silence; I view my Inquiries as leading to the generative Silence  that allowed for a new problem definition to emerge.

In the end my boss acknowledged the focus and insight provided by pairing; the routing problem was solved shorlty afterwards with the new things we learned. The remarks about him being a lone cowboy SysAdmin, still present.

Via planet python I read of a pythonista and craftsman feed-up with software establishment, and turning away from professional software development; he wants Art and energy back in his code. A brave guy, not afraid of the GIL-Dragons.

I know many people are slowing down and searching for fulfillment where the little things don’t get in the way. Patrick’s choice in this is bar-tending for a living, and coding as part of his life. To me that choice implies lots of beer-tending and not that much/good coding; but working for non-profits, local communities, or just embracing simplicity are also approaches that probably wouldn’t suit me.

I’m trying the Natural Enterprise way, coding and technology for life and profit (mutual and responsible). I stand in the shoulders of those that contribute to Free Software project. My question is how integrate those Free Software coders in a working gift economy. Current donation and micro-payment schemes don’t work; they are good for the middle man but not cost effective for nano-lending (tips, <10$). Maybe an open field for non-currencies,the P2P micro-credits, and fund-raising entities.

I heartily recommend comments to Patrick’s post as well as his archived posts on coding, energy, and Art.

As Wouter, I find the biggest drawback to multi-filesystem layouts is lack of flexibility when resources are scarce; scarcity means laptops in the Wouter’s post. I’m thinking of long-lived servers in need of upgrades, in particular those with a life of unplanned and ad-hoc growth.

When scarcity strikes: drama.  The cleanup dance isn’t a solution, everything clogging /var and other undersized partitions is of value; forget about deleting it. On the first storage famines I go resizing the affected filesystems with unused/un-partioned space(yay, I planned for un-planned growth). After the resizing is done you realize that some other partition also need extra storage.

Here comes the cleanup-moving dance. First put data out of /var and system partitions, then update configuration for the affected services or start symlinking to the new directories.

My two worst cases were bacula related. In both bacula’s database needed more space than its current partition could afford:

• Shortly after updating retain period for data backups to two years (ISO requirement). Database moved to a new server where …
• When we moved from cvs to git; again bacula’ db jumped in size. It had to be moved and symlinked to /var.